A design career can—with hard work and good fortune—last 40 years or more. But turbulent economies make that tough. A career is an individual endeavor, less planned or authored than lived. It can seem like a series of random gigs and jobs, highs and lows, dramas and surprises that tell a coherent story only in hindsight. It can be overwhelming at times. Some design career coaching seems timely right now. This amounts to a career coaching workshop series in three acts in July, September and November 2020.

This is Act 1: Building Your Core Value Stock as a Designer.

In this 90 minute session we will cover:

• Design knowledge, skills and understandings acquisition
• Learning to master norms and expectations of professional practice
• Contributing actively in social, team-based designing
• Learning systematic new value creation (innovation) practice skills
• Portfolio-building and documentation
• Embracing primary user research to extract valid human insights and ideas
• Mastering secondary research to contextualize strategy and frame problems

Michael Eckersley leads HumanCentered, a design research and innovation consultancy. He also leads the Design Masters program at The University of Kansas. Prior to founding HumanCentered, he served as Design Strategy Director at Sybase (SAP). His Industry experience spans Health Care, Enterprise Software, Financial Services, Consumer Products, Air Sensor Systems, and Fast Food. With advanced degrees in design and cognitive science, he is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and Ball State University.